


Burgundy

by Tierfal



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Christmas, Crossover, Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M, Professors
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2021-02-15
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:54:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28232760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: Ed already has everything that he could dream of wanting, but the Christmas season does mark an anniversary of good things growing out of something very bad.
Relationships: Edward Elric/Roy Mustang
Comments: 29
Kudos: 264
Collections: FMA Secret Santa 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is my [FMA Secret Santa](https://fmasecretsanta2020.tumblr.com/) gift for [Cha](https://cadrioxxx.tumblr.com/)!! ♥ I know she really likes Harry Potter AUs, so I took that and ran. XD I hope you enjoy it and have a lovely holiday, friend!! ;___; ♥ I think I remember you saying somewhere that you're not a huge fan of wintry/holiday-themed stuff, but the Potterverse got the better of me there, so I hope it's okay! OTL
> 
> Side note: JKR is a garbage person, but if you still enjoy stealing her universe and using it in a way that appeals to you, GOOD. That is your right. You belong here. :)
> 
> Note about the fic: this is set a bit after the bulk of the original canon. Ed and Al enrolled at Hogwarts relatively soon after the whole Voldemort-kablooie/Deathly Hallows deal, so they would have graduated in approximately 2008-2010 ish. In the present-tense part of this, Ed's about 26, and Roy's about 40; and flashbacky bits will have their own context!
> 
> Most important note: this chapter is rated T, but the next chapter(s??) will be a cautious M for quasi-canon-typical levels of violence. I hecked up and forgot that I needed to keep things T-rated for the exchange, but I'm hoping that if you're not in the mood for some blood next chapter, this will be entertaining and will stand okay on its own. c: I'll share more warnings next time! ♥

“Odd,” Ed says, skimming down another sheet of cramped, ink-blotted scribbles about how conservation of mass pertains to Transfigurations seeking to combine multiple objects. His students try so hard to make him proud. It hurts like hell—sometimes inside; sometimes primarily to his hand. “I would’ve had much more time to mark these if I hadn’t had to console another weeping sixth-year who thinks she’s in love with her Potions teacher, and can’t decide whether it’s worse that it’s true, or that he hasn’t even noticed.”

Roy’s grin has a deep touch of a wince in it—and, really, when you get right down to it, that’s why Ed’s been doomed for so damn long. For all of the posturing and preening and pretentiousness and nonsense, Roy Mustang _cares_ more than anyone that Ed’s ever met except for Al.

“Hmm,” Roy says, tilting his head so that his hair sweeps across his forehead in a way that’s mesmerizing. Ed forces himself to look down at the marking again. “Did you tell her that he’s attached?”

“I told her the truth,” Ed says. “Which is that that happens to pretty much all of us, and it’s perfectly understandable, and having feelings that you don’t want isn’t your fault, and what you’re responsible for is how you act on them.”

“Are you blushing?” Roy asks, sounding positively _gleeful_ , and Ed retracts all of the generous things that he’d just thought.

“Shut your horrendous mouth so that I can finish this,” Ed says. “And start doing up the top button of your shirt before you teach class. You’re a _tease_.”

“But it’s such a tragedy,” Roy says, “to put unnecessary buttons in the way of progress. It would slow you down when you’re ready to undo them. I couldn’t bear to inconvenience you like that.”

Ed puts his metal index finger down on the parchment to hold his place and glares over the top of his glasses. “You’re too damn hot, Mustang. At least try to make it _marginally_ less distracting. It’s the only decent thing to do.”

“Don’t flatter me,” Roy says, beaming bright enough to light a whole corridor. “My head will swell, and I’ll end up intolerable.”

“Too late for both,” Ed says, returning to the endless wall of multiple choice questions that he himself had been fool enough to assign. “You can squander another half an hour here as penance.”

“My dearest love,” Roy says, which makes Ed’s head jerk up again in spite of him, “time spent with you is never wasted.”

Ed eyes him.

“Time spent _annoying_ you,” Roy says, warmly, “is even less-wasted. I’d like that on my epitaph, if you don’t mind.”

Ed grips his pen a little tighter and then tries to force his fingers to relax. “Shut it. Everyone who’s ever met you knows that you’d crawl back up out of the grave to write it yourself if we didn’t give you what you’d wanted.”

Roy’s sly, trying-not-to-be-overly-amused smile has always been one of Ed’s favorites. Then again, they’re all Ed’s favorites these days. It’s awful. “A compliment on persistence from you, my dear, is truly—”

“Stop calling me that,” Ed says.

“No chance,” Roy says. “Is it really going to take a whole half-hour? I could go and acquire us some sustenance and bring it back. Or I could teach you the exquisite art of the practical exam, which is, incredibly enough, marked in _real time_.”

Ed leans forward to give him a more thorough eyeing. “Everything happens in real time by definition, Mustang. Apparently,” he says, gesturing to the stack of parchment in front of him, “that includes you discovering that you’ve run out of work to procrastinate on, so now you’re procrastinating on _mine_.” 

Roy laughs. Roy does not, however, deny it.

Ed pulls another face for good measure and then squares his shoulders, which Roy correctly interprets as a sign that he’s actually trying to push through the rest of the exams. Roy holds out for five more minutes before he does the Bad Thing and extracts his smartphone from his trouser pocket. You can’t call or text or use your data on school grounds, but he has so many little mindless games to distract himself with that it’s usually worth it even if he can’t Google obscure wizarding words and dramatically read out all of the suggestions. Occupying his hands helps him keep his mind off of… well, everything. They’re a lot alike that way.

Except that only one of them cares about _academic integrity_ , evidently.

Roy waits, though. He kindly silenced all the sounds on his phone, so the occasional bout of thumb tapping and the subtle shifts of his body in the chair settle easily into the background. It’s like a Sunday at home without the record player.

Ed sinks into the deep well of his own capacity to focus, which is a comfortable, familiar disconnect from the rest of the universe. Everything fades around him, softening at the edges, dulling to a murmur and a few patches of color and diffused light.

He shudders awake again when he’s reached the bottom of the pile. It always feels like surfacing from water, or shaking free of a dream.

Not a bad one—he has more than his share of those. None of the terror; none of the chilled blood and scampering heartbeat; none of the desperate casting about in the bed for evidence that it wasn’t real. Just… unsettling.

And he’s _cold_.

He manages to make his beleaguered eyes focus on Roy, who has just noticed him sitting back in his desk chair. Roy smiles, pockets the phone without even quitting whatever game he’s been focused on this whole time, stands, and draws Ed’s gloves out from a pocket of his coat.

Ed blinks. “Where…”

“You left them behind this morning,” Roy says. “I thought that you might miss them.”

Roy bought him this pair of _extremely_ nice fur-lined leather gloves—black, with red detailing—two birthdays ago. Roy had given him a very bland look when he’d remarked that Roy had spent far too much money on acquiring a pair in the first place, when he could have just popped by a charity shop and adopted a single glove for the cost of some pocket change, since Ed’s right hand is insensitive to temperature anyway. Roy had then very pointedly grabbed Ed’s wrists, fit both of the gloves on him one at a time, and given him thirty seconds to wriggle his fingers appreciatively before dragging him to the bedroom to enjoy their texture in a very different capacity.

The point is that Ed loves those gloves, so he must have had his head _way_ up in the clouds to forget them.

Unfortunately, that’s not unusual.

Fortunately, Roy’s learned to keep an eye out for it.

As soon as he’s packed the exams into the top-left drawer of his desk—which is locked so securely that any troublemakers who tried it would likely realize why he’s so good at troublemaker-proofing—Roy holds the gloves out to him and then fusses about with Ed’s scarf while he’s pulling them onto his swiftly-numbing left-hand fingers.

“Let’s get some hot food in you before we head out,” Roy says. “Three Broomsticks all right, or does that sound too rowdy tonight?”

Ed has never been much for crowds even under ordinary circumstances, and he tends to be a little tetchier about it on the nights leading up to the full moon. His body knows what’s coming—worse, what it _thinks_ is coming, which isn’t, and won’t—and diverts all of its resources into survival mode. Voices and noise and unnecessary external stimuli put him more on-edge than ever.

On the other hand… pub food.

“I think that’ll be all right,” he says. Roy smoothes the tails of the scarf down his chest, which is totally unnecessary and feels sublime. Ed is still working on the right way to express the forbidden knowledge that when Roy idly reached out and scratched behind his temporary wolf ears last month, it felt like a fucking religious experience. He didn’t _ask_ to be a furry, and Roy didn’t ask for a once-a-month giant wolfdog pet. What a mess.

Roy buttons his coat for him, which might come off as slightly infantilizing if Ed hadn’t just stupidly put his gloves on before doing it himself. Buttons are hard enough with one hand; with one hand that’s encased in leather, you might as well sit still and wish for them to do themselves up all on their own.

He could, and often does, use a spell, of course. But this is much more enjoyable.

“Once you’ve wrapped up the sacred task of babying me,” Ed says, “are _you_ ready?”

Roy chucks him under the chin with a knuckle for that, which he deserves. “I’ve been ready for well over an hour. And after that grossly undeserved insult to my moral character, I think you’re buying tonight.”

Ed sticks his tongue out. Roy sticks his out right back, and then offers his right hand for Ed’s left, and then they’re off.

  


* * *

  


The bite of iciness in the air draws Ed’s eyes upward to the cover of the clouds. Unfallen snow; unspoken words; unwritten promises. So much of life takes place between the lines.

“How are you feeling?” Roy asks, in the soft voice that he reserves for quiet little moments like this, when the question doesn’t carry a single trace of banter. When he’s serious.

“Not any worse than yesterday,” Ed says. He rolls the word around in his mouth for a moment, but it’s not going to be any closer to enough if he gives it a second to swell. “Thanks.”

Roy’s hand brushes against his back. “In a feat of psychology that would delight Pavlov past description, I think that I’ve conditioned myself to enjoy the taste of mine.”

“Bullshit,” Ed says.

“Probably,” Roy says. “But it’s well-intentioned.”

The first time that Ed had turned up on Roy’s doorstep, shoulders hunched and heart in his throat, to choke down a goblet of the worst potion known to humankind, he’d done the choking-down part whilst sitting in the cushy wing chair in Roy’s living room; and Roy had watched him, grimacing openly.

The second night, and every night in every month thereafter, he’s done it sitting on the sofa, with Roy settled down beside him, swirling a goblet of an equally foul-smelling concoction as if it’s a nice merlot. They hold their noses and drink together. Roy has claimed since the beginning that his is a potion that will stop his hair from turning gray, and that “ _sometimes the price of beauty is noxious distillations, which only seems fair_ ”.

Ed didn’t believe him the first time. Ed believes him even less lately, given that he’s going progressively more silver at the temples.

(It just makes him look distinguished, of course, because he is a bastard in absolutely all things, absolutely all of the time.)

Ed isn’t sure whether he should be proud to admit that he’s developed a remarkable adeptness for popping open his little tube of painkillers with the right hand so that he can tip two pills into his left palm and toss them into his mouth.

Roy makes a soft noise so deep in his chest that he may not even be conscious of it. It always makes Ed’s knee a little weak, although he’ll die before admitting that one. “How many of those have you had today?”

“Not quite enough,” Ed says. “It’s _snowing_ , Mustang.”

Roy looks at him, and he looks back, because he was raised properly-ish.

That’s enough of a distraction for Roy to snatch the bottle right out of his cold-slowed metal fingers and stash it in one of the inner pockets of his coat, with typical stage-magician flair.

“ _Roy_ ,” Ed says, reaching for him and trying to grab onto his coat. The leather of the gloves slips against the wool as Roy dances out of his way.

“Someone has to think of your liver,” Roy says. “You’ll just have to strip me later if you want them back.”

It’s a fiendish plan, really, because by the time they got that far, they’d be inside and warmed up, and Ed would struggle enormously to remember the prospect of painkillers as the layers peeled away.

It’s good that it’s not a long walk to Hogsmeade; even so, the steel in Ed’s arm is already shrinking on him by the time they step into the Three Broomsticks. The pub is chock full of celebrants and students and people taking refuge from the cold. The space looks even more crowded because most of the patrons have bundled up or tossed their coats and scarves down on their chairs, which fills the place with wool and fur and puffy polyester.

Roy manages to find a table within the first thirty seconds anyway, because Roy’s the sort of person who’s never had to drive around his destination four times looking for a sliver of curbside to park the car.

“Let me—” Ed attempts.

“Sit,” Roy says. The bastard’s lucky that the love pours off of it despite the shortness of the syllable; Ed obeys on instinct instead of bristling. “You’re in pain, Ed. I’ll be right back.”

Ed makes a point of scowling at him, but Roy’s grin makes it very clear that he sees straight through that. He winks before he sashays up towards the bar.

Ed tries not to pay too much attention to their surroundings; the last thing he wants is to notice a cluster of students two tables over and feel self-conscious every time that Roy gazes adoringly into his eyes. They haven’t done a damn thing wrong; their employer already knows and isn’t bothered; if the students find out, then… they find out. No skin off anyone’s back. It wouldn’t change anything. Ed is allowed to have this, and he doesn’t have to guard it like a hoard from the greedy, grabbing world. It’s his. It’s stable. It’s safe.

Roy returns with butterbeer for Ed and firewhiskey for himself and a basket of chips for both of them, and it should probably be embarrassing that Ed’s whole chest feels warm before he’s even had a sip. Roy has a way of infiltrating his ribcage and soothing him from the inside out. It would qualify as disturbing and possibly diabolical if it wasn’t so damn gorgeous.

“So,” Roy says once they’re both a little ways into their drinks. “Christmas.”

“Yeah,” Ed says. He’s going to receive several new scarves from Al and Roy both to add to his Fashionable Scar Coverers collection. He feels like he should mind by now. Maybe it’s the butterbeer, but he just feels sort of cozily pleased about it. “Al’s doing that Christmas Eve party thing again, so he’s going to need some extra help.”

“Which he told you to offer only if you were up to it,” Roy says, gesturing idly with a chip that he should put in his mouth already, “to which you said that you would actually die before you abandoned him to the sort of people who mob a cat café on Christmas Eve for discounted theme snacks, to which he said that that wasn’t nearly so funny as you seem to think it is, to which—”

“Why do you even keep me around?” Ed asks. “You can have the whole conversation by yourself. What do you need me for?”

“Your boyish charm and dashing good looks,” Roy says. “Wait, I think that’s why _you_ put up with _me_.”

Ed tries to hide the grin behind his mug, but he’s probably not succeeding. “Something like that.”

“I think that’s also why I’m going to get enlisted as a temporary server,” Roy says.

“You don’t have to,” Ed says, like Ed says every year.

“It’s fun,” Roy says.

Ed raises an eyebrow.

“It’s fun at intervals,” Roy says. “Come on. It’s more fun than sitting at home alone on Christmas Eve, twiddling my thumbs and waiting for you to be finished over there. At least this way I can sneak looks at your ass every time you come out from behind the counter.”

“By God,” Ed says. “You’re simply too noble for your own good. Would you help more if I let you choose my clothes, then?”

“I’d scrub every last centimeter of the floors,” Roy says.

“Done,” Ed says.

“With my tongue,” Roy says.

“Eew,” Ed says.

“This,” Roy says, gazing upward, “may well be the best Christmas ever.”

“We’ll see about that,” Ed says.

“Ah,” Roy says, gesturing with a chip again. Ed should really just buy him a conductor’s baton for Christmas, so that he doesn’t have to resort to recruiting food when using his wand would be dangerous. “I’ve meant to ask you—can I contribute to Al’s gift this year? It’s really time that I gave him a separate one from me, but I always…” He grimaces. “…panic.”

“He wouldn’t even care what it was,” Ed says. “He’d just be happy that you thought of him. He _likes_ you.”

“I understand that in a rational way,” Roy says, “but…”

“I know,” Ed says. He steals the specific chip that Roy was reaching for, just to make him pout. “Well, there’s good news for your completely baseless paranoia about Al wanting to hurt you for stealing his precious brother away or whatever the hell it is. I found him this big set of nice glass mixing bowls, right, where each one has got a picture of a different cat breed at the bottom, and the average sizes of the breeds of the cats correlate to the sizes of the bowls. They’re cute. He’s going to scream. But there’s also a set of measuring cups to match that I wasn’t quite ready to spring for. I can pick those up, and then we can give them to him together, and he’ll sit down on the floor and cry.”

Roy is definitely gazing at him already. They’ve only been here for ten minutes. “Genius.”

“Stop devaluing that word,” Ed says. “What about you? Have you checked Riza off of your list yet? I can pitch in for hers.”

Roy transitions from gazing rapturously at Ed to gazing in some consternation at the wall. “I believe I’m going to buy her a staple gun.”

“Great,” Ed says. “I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anything more terrifying in my life.”

Roy nods idly. “My feelings exactly. At least if we provide it, she’s marginally less likely to use it on us.”

“You’re not helping,” Ed says.

Roy grins. “You know quite well that that’s my primary goal in life.”

Ed glowers at him.

Roy continues grinning.

Then Roy says, “Oh, by the way—can I trick you into going to Harrods with me this weekend?”

Ed is in far, far, far too deep: his brain doesn’t even vacillate. It immediately, unhesitatingly resigns itself to following Roy directly into the lowest, loudest circle of overcrowded, overpriced, over-the-top retail hell. Ed would do worse for him. Ed would do anything.

“I need to find something for my mother,” Roy is saying.

Ed tries to cover at least part of the face that he’s making with his mug. “She _has_ to have something from Harrods?”

“No, no,” Roy says. “I think she’d actually disown me unless I presented a receipt showing that I’d been in the clearance section. It’ll be convenient, though; there’s a Harvey Nichols just by the station. That’s the only tea she’ll drink, for reasons that are entirely beyond me, but it’s about time to stock up.” He sits back in his chair and swirls the firewhiskey in his glass. “I just like going to Harrods around Christmas,” he says, thoughtfully now. “It’s like having the abstract concept of festivity explode directly in your face. There are a few bits that are like an abstract art museum, except admission is free. And then some of it’s more like an amusement park, except that you can’t touch anything, because everything for sale is worth more than your life.”

As far as Ed’s concerned, _nothing_ is worth more than Roy’s life, and Harrods can kiss every last molecule of his ass.

He can’t exactly say that, though.

So instead he says, “You’re a special kind of masochist, Mustang.”

Roy beams at him.

The impending stint in Harrods hell notwithstanding, Ed is looking forward to the holiday—to the peace and the quiet, most of all; but also to Roy wearing reindeer antlers, and Al cooing over the cats, and Winry phoning to yell at him down the line about the new crop of tools she just unwrapped while Paninya yells in the background about how Muggle electricity is profiteering.

Ed’s come around on Christmas. It’s gotten better and brighter every year since the one that brought him and Roy together, and even Harrods can’t change that.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for this one: there's quite a bit of blood in it. I'd say it's "canon-typical" levels, but I always tend to feel that violence in text is more _personal_ than animated violence, and it's a (non-sexual) assault scene, so I did want to flag it! I went back and forth about raising the rating from T to M, so please bear that in mind (and please let me know if you think it merits an M, and I'll fix that!).
> 
> I also want to mention that there are a few quick comments about unrequited Roy/Hughes in this fic – I didn't think it was enough for a ship tag, but I did want to make sure to put that out there. ♥
> 
> Lastly, unrelated to this fic in particular, applications for the Equivalent Exchange Anthology are open until February 28th, and whatever you like to make, we have an app you! :D [**CHECK IT OUT**](https://equivalentexchangeanthology.tumblr.com/post/641910594023325697/applications-are-now-open-for-the-equivalent)! ♥

On December eighteenth, four years prior, Ed had been doing his Christmas-and-Al’s-birthday shopping the same way that he did everything: dangerously late, and absolutely brilliantly. The universe had rewarded him for his procrastination with a crisp night, a hell of a lot of sales, and a staggeringly beautiful full moon hanging pale and heavy overhead. Regent Street had been _mobbed_ , as he’d expected, but he’d been slipping in between the elbows of the miserable people buying things for other miserable people, and he was nearly ready to dart into a side alley and Apparate home and cram all of his prizes into the closet until a time when Al wouldn’t see him wrapping everything. He was still divvying up exactly what was meant for Christmas, and what was for the birthday a week later. Al’s birthday always got the better ones, because he wanted Al to understand that the birthday was the more important thing.

He’d still been helping Al run the cat-café-slash-bookstore on Diagon Alley that year. He’d known by then that, now that the place was set up and bustling with business and rolling along, Al no longer really _needed_ any of his so-called help, but Ed hadn’t quite settled on anything else that he’d wanted to do. Maybe something that paid better, so that he could buy better gifts—he’d really needed the sales that year. It would be nice to be able to buy stuff for Al’s birthday later on and not have to worry about that sort of thing.

He’d been proposing and discarding alternatives in his brain when he’d noticed a flash of bright green light from behind the bins and bags of rubbish in a narrow alleyway between two of the big, fancy stores.

Magic.

He’d known that it was stupid—he’d felt it in his guts and his remaining bones.

But he’d remembered. He’d remembered what it was like to be a terrified child, suddenly possessed of a power that you didn’t understand and couldn’t figure out how to control. He’d remembered what it was like hiding it from the Rockbells, wiping Al’s tears up with his sleeves. He’d remembered what it was like desperately trying to believe that the reaction that had stripped him of two limbs and eviscerated his baby brother was some kind of fluke.

He remembered what it was like letting the magic burst out of him in the failing hope that somebody might _notice_. That there might be others. That maybe, just _maybe_ , someone could help. Maybe something could be done. Maybe everything wasn’t quite over yet.

So he’d stepped into the alley, cautious of the damp pavement slick beneath his shoes; cautious of the way that his metal ankle wouldn’t instinctively adjust and compensate for the surface like his right one did; cautious of the way that his eyes weren’t adjusting fast enough to parse the darkness after the intensity of the glowing storefronts and the spectrum of knitted hats and holiday lights.

“Hello?” he called. Logically, he knew that there wasn’t a chance in hell of anyone hearing him from the street, but a part of him still wanted to lower his voice. “Hey, I saw… I might be able to help you. Okay? I just want to help.”

There was a long silence—ahead, at least; behind him the road was still teeming with people passing by and shouting their conversations to make themselves heard over the crowd.

And then there was a detectable rustling from behind the biggest Dumpster in the alleyway.

He drew a deep breath, held it, ignored the Winry voice in his head telling him to run for his life, and slowly moved forward.

“Hey,” he said again. “I’m on your side. It’s okay. Are you hurt? I can help you. Just—”

The shape that slammed into him struck him with so much force that it knocked the wind out of him on impact.

Teeth sunk into his throat—impossible teeth; teeth like knives and nightmares—and blood streamed hotter and wetter still than the mouth fixed against his skin—

They hit the ground. The pavement tore his gloves and smacked the back of his skull so hard that sparks danced at the corners of his eyes. Blood _surged_ ; the weight on top of him—

He lashed out with the right arm and the left leg, weak and clumsy as he wheezed for a scrap of oxygen, as the body pinning his pressed down harder, grinding the back of his head against the concrete.

He had his wand tucked into an inner jacket pocket—if he could just—

His assailant growled low and thick and greedy, and the jaws around his neck tightened—blood spilled swifter yet, pouring onto the cement, soaking his clothes, hot first and then _cold_.

His blood.

He wouldn’t—he _wouldn’t_ —fucking die in a West End alleyway without Al ever even knowing _why_.

He wrenched his body sideways, trying to dislodge the fangs dug into his flesh, trying to haul himself loose, trying to wrangle his way into enough leverage to pry himself free and—

A snarl rolled across him as searing breath poured against his skin, over his face—

The werewolf shook him like a rope toy—so violently that his metal arm nearly jerked hard enough to dislocate from the socket, and then—

Dropped him—

And was gone.

He lay still, gasping reedily.

And then he sat up, forcing his tingling left arm underneath himself, and hauled his half-soaked scarf from where he’d hung it around his shoulders five minutes and a lifetime ago. He balled it up and pressed it as firmly as he could to the gaping wound still gushing yet more blood down his neck, dripping it down his back, sending it seeping down his whole left arm.

He didn’t have as much blood to start with as most people did. It was fascinating, in a way—he could _feel_ himself going into shock. The pain, which had been too enormous altogether to quantify, settled down to a distant sort of throbbing. His brain was trying to wash its hands of the whole nasty business and head off on an ill-timed vacation to a world where life didn’t beat the shit out of you while you were just trying to finish the shopping for Christmas.

He was not going to process this now. He couldn’t afford it. He was not going to think about tomorrow; he was not going to think about a month from now. He was going to live. He was going to save his own stupid ass at this precise, particular minute. The rest of it could wait.

He reeled his brain back in and held on tightly. No panic. The burgeoning agony was a distraction he could handle; it wasn’t quite as bad as amputation yet. No panic. Solutions.

One solution.

He’d only ever set foot on Mustang’s doorstep once before—one of the times that Mr. Hughes had let them tag along on his errands as a way of gently introducing them to some of the magic mirror images of the world they’d known before. It was something that their shitty, absentee excuse for a biological father should have done, although admittedly Hohenheim probably would have had fewer pie deliveries to make.

But once was enough. The address would have been enough.

The alternative was dying.

Ed Apparated.

His hand had been numb by the time he’d knocked, but apparently he’d managed to convey the urgency.

Mustang had stared at him for one long second before dragging him inside, laying him down on the sofa, and going for the bandages and the powdered silver.

There were a lot of advantages to appearing on your old Potions teacher’s front stoop with blood still leaking out of your gruesome life-threatening injury. There were even more advantages when your professor been an Auror first. There was another handful of them in the fact that Ed and Mustang had worked their way from deliberately making each other miserable to establishing a grudging, unarticulated mutual respect over the course of seven years; and Ed was hoping that a few years of absence after that had made the past fade further still.

Al had once gone in after another class to ask Mustang for help with the OWLs. They’d both known that Al didn’t actually _need_ help, obviously, but Ed had followed him anyway, and they’d caught Mustang with one foot in the Floo-prepped fireplace to go home for the night. Al had asked him why he didn’t stay on the campus like the rest of the teachers did, and Mustang had arched the famous eyebrow and flashed the famous smirk and said, “I spent seven years forced to live underneath the lake. If I never have to set foot in that miserable dungeon again, it’ll still be too soon.”

You couldn’t Apparate into Hogwarts.

Mustang’s prissiness had just saved Ed’s life.

Well. Hopefully, anyway. He wasn’t positive that he’d made it in time, but he’d damn sure fucking _tried_.

Mustang worked so fast and so efficiently at sealing the giant mess on Ed’s neck with silver and dittany—and stopping all of the bleeding, and gently cleaning around it—that the combination of his intensely focused gorgeousness and the general stinging and throbbing and burning almost monopolized Ed’s attention.

Almost.

A soulful male voice crooning about tiny tots with their eyes all aglow drew _his_ eyes—which he sincerely hoped were not aglowing, since he quite certainly had enough fucking problems today—over to the quaint conical horn spewing Christmas cheer all over Mustang’s blood-spattered sitting room.

“I can’t believe you,” Ed gasped out.

Mustang looked marginally alarmed, which was a huge red flag by Mustang Face Standards. Ed didn’t have the energy to keep him in suspense, though.

“You are playing,” Ed said, somewhat unsteadily, “the Michael Bublé _Christmas_ album. Every time I ever walk into a store in December for the rest of my natural life, I’m going to hear this shit dribbling from the speakers, and I’m gonna have flashbacks to dying on your fucking sofa.”

“You’re not dying,” Mustang said.

“Close enough,” Ed said. Clinging to the tiny surge of stupid anger felt strangely reassuring—like a lifeline. “You have it on a _record_. I can’t believe you even own a phonograph. Nobody uses fucking phonographs anymore. That’s an _antique_. What’s wrong with you?”

“Last time I checked,” Mustang said, drawing himself up to his full height in the chair, the bloodied white towel in hand evidently notwithstanding, “it wasn’t a crime to be old-fashioned.”

“You should check again,” Ed said.

Mustang looked at him for a long second. Well before he spoke, Ed knew that they weren’t going to be talking about the record anymore.

“Why did you come here?” Mustang said.

Ed knew that that really meant _Why did you come to_ me _?_

Unfortunately, Ed was also too fucking drained to come up with a lie.

“Nobody else,” he said, “would’ve stayed calm and reacted fast enough to stop me from bleeding out. And you’ve got medical training. And—” He swallowed, but it didn’t change the spike-edged contours of the words. “I know that you can keep a secret.”

Mustang looked at him for a lot longer this time.

It had taken Ed a hell of a while to piece it together, honestly—he’d noticed that Mustang looked at Mr. Hughes differently when Mr. Hughes wasn’t looking back, but he’d been a kid back then. He’d sidled one step closer to understanding when Hughes had died in that whole unthinkable thing with the shapeshifter, because Mustang’s grief hadn’t _just_ been the loss of a dear friend; hadn’t _just_ been guilt over the fact that if he hadn’t quit the Auror gig and taken up teaching, he might have been there. It wasn’t just that Mustang might have been able to stop it.

Or that Mustang might have been the one who had died instead.

The fact that Mustang had quit the Auror gig in the first place hadn’t made sense for a long time, either, until Ed had discovered just how absolutely, utterly, obliteratively infuriating it was to fall in love with someone that you simply couldn’t have.

It hadn’t fully clicked until McGonagall had taken him aside two weeks before graduation and said, “Mr. Elric… to cut directly to the chase, you’ve done an admirable job of learning how to manage your anger and temper your tongue. I think you’d make a fine professor if you ever wished to.”

He’d just barely managed not to look in the direction of the Potions classroom before he’d said, “That means a lot. Really. But I’ve got to get out of here.”

Mustang wrung the towel out into a bowl, which dripped enough diluted blood that Ed’s head went light all over again. Mustang was looking at the towel, frowning at it like it had personally offended him.

Then he took a deep breath, let it out, and forced a little smile.

“All three of those things are true,” he said. He paused, and then he balled up a blanket and shoved it under Ed’s left foot to elevate it.

“Cheers,” Ed said. “Glad we had this talk.”

“As am I,” Mustang said, leaning in again. Ed looked at the ceiling. “You should stop talking.”

“Medically?” Ed asked. The ceiling swam a bit. “Or because you’d almost managed to forget what a pain in the ass I can be?”

“Both,” Roy said. “I’m insulted that you pretended not to know that. Stay still.”

Ed tried.

He lay there, jaw set against this body’s increasingly urgent desire to shiver uncontrollably. The dittany had sealed the wound up well; he could feel that much, but he could hear that he was breathing faster. He was used to being a bit uncouth, but it would be _really_ rude to go into hypovolemic shock in your old teacher’s sitting room right before Christmas. Embarrassing.

Ed’s brain cycled endlessly, fixing on details, dragging in bright fragments of half-thoughts splotched with shadows. The gleam of the moonlight on the teeth, dripping red. The stench of the Dumpster. The weight of the bags making the plastic of their handles cut into his palm. The pain, partly; but more pronouncedly the fear, the fear, the _fear_ —

The… bags. The shopping. Everything he’d picked so lovingly for Al—

“Shit,” he gasped out, trying to get an elbow underneath himself. The left one failed him; the right one held. “I’ve got to—I left all of—I can’t afford to buy all that stuff _again_ , I’ve _got_ to—”

Mustang’s hand spread itself on his collarbones and shoved him flat on the sofa again so fast that his head spun.

“Don’t make me use a spell,” Mustang said. Ed knew that he was serious, which was the worst part, right up until the part where Mustang’s eyes narrowed. “Where were you?”

“Oxford Street,” Ed said, wriggling against the hand holding him to the cushion—but not too hard.

Mustang’s eyes were like flint. “Where exactly?”

“It’s fine,” Ed said, useless and helpless, with his head still spinning recklessly. “I’m fine. I just—”

“Do _not_ move,” Mustang said, with a cold edge of steel beneath his voice that Ed had never heard before.

Oddly, it reminded him of Mr. Hughes.

“I mean it,” Mustang said. He stood, and adjusted his… Ed had not quite processed until this moment that he was wearing a cardigan. Dark blue. “Not a damn muscle. I’m a teacher. I’ll _know_.”

Ed made a face at him, which used muscles. “How ’bout breathing? Heartbeats all right?”

“Start with your mouth,” Mustang said. “Hang on.”

He stepped back, eyeing Ed the entire time, and then headed swiftly into the kitchen. There was some rattling about, and then he returned with a bottle of Lucozade—the label colors looked like original flavor, not that Ed had an unsettling amount of experience treating those as breakfast when Winry’s gran wasn’t looking, or anything—and a little red and white straw.

“You’re going to drink this,” Mustang said, “while you continue to _not move_. Which store?”

“I—” Ed closed his eyes, trying to dig back through the swirl of memories he hadn’t thought he’d needed. Mustang was trying to help. Possibly. That or he was planning to fuck off with all of Ed’s Christmas shopping, but since Ed was in his house, that seemed unlikely. “Think I’d… I’d passed the Doc Martens store. Remember that.”

He opened his eyes again. Mustang was looking down at him like he was either something terrible or something marvelous. Maybe both.

“If you move,” Mustang said, “I will tell him. I will tell him that I instructed you not to, for your own safety, and you didn’t listen.”

“I get it,” Ed said. “I do a better statue imitation when no one’s watching. Performance anxiety, y’know.”

Mustang sighed, and then he drew his wand, and then he Apparated with a crack like a whip that ruffled Ed’s bangs where they weren’t glued to his face with drying blood.

  


* * *

  


It wasn’t the longest ten minutes of Ed’s life, but it featured on the list somewhere. Fourth or fifth, maybe. He needed a more precise rating system. Weighted categories. A rubric.

Lucozade tasted much more fortifying late at night after you’d had the shit kicked out of you than it did first thing in the morning, although the carbonation still didn’t sit quite right with Ed. He’d always wondered if they’d picked slightly cough-syrupy flavors on purpose, to try to sell the so-called health benefits. The rush of sugar was probably not going to help this situation overmuch, but considering the high odds that Mustang had just given him the last hangover cure in the house, he refused on principle to be ungrateful about it. He was going to chug this whole damn nose-tickling bottle, and move as little as possible, and try extremely hard to be civil about it.

It was also good to have something to pass the time, even if that _something_ was regular sips of fizzy artificial indistinct-citrus flavor. Mustang had a slightly antique-looking clock on the wall opposite the couch, over his television; Ed couldn’t tell if it was actually old, or if that was just part of Mustang’s aesthetic for a room with a goddamn phonograph in it. The flatscreen kind of ruined it either way.

Fucking Michael Bublé.

It was not the longest ten minutes of Ed’s life. And Ed still fucking _had_ a life—that was the important thing.

Mustang came back with all of the bags that Ed remembered carrying. Mustang even went to the trouble of setting them down one by one on the coffee table right by the couch, so that Ed could see them and count them.

Then Mustang turned to him again.

“I did you a favor,” Mustang said. His eyes were unreadable again. Ed wanted to shiver, and also to throw a cushion at his head. “Now you owe me one.”

Ed’s voice croaked, likely more from the recent assault than from the recent silence streaked with panic. “We’ll see.”

Mustang sat in the chair again and folded his arms across his chest. “You need a transfusion.”

“Come _on_ ,” Ed said. “There’s gotta be a potion you can whip up that’ll convince my body that it’s not as anemic as it is. What the hell is a Muggle ER gonna do about this, do you think?”

“Take it at your word that you were bitten by a stray dog,” Mustang said. “Make sure that you don’t have rabies. Replenish the blood loss instead of just masking the symptoms. Ed—”

“Don’t you dare,” Ed said.

Mustang smiled, thin and flat like a switchblade. “What would Al want?”

Ed gritted his teeth. “Al’s not here.”

“No,” Mustang said, standing up and brushing imaginary wrinkles out of his slacks. “But we should ring him. He’ll be worried sick about you by now.”

“I’m not going to the hospital,” Ed called after the bastard as he sauntered off into the neat little kitchen. “I fucking hate the hospital. I’ll sleep it off. I’ll be fine.”

Mustang came back into the kitchen doorway to glare at him.

Ed raised his right arm, which felt unusually heavy even by the slightly distressing normal standards. “What do you think a Muggle ER is gonna do about _this_ , then? They don’t get it. They _can’t_ get it. Turns it into a whole thing, and the Ministry has to get involved, and somebody has to go all Men in Black and mind-wipe a bunch of innocent people who were just trying to do their job helping _normal_ citizens with _normal_ ER injuries, and—”

Mustang eyed him for another second, but Ed thought he might detect a sliver of concession in it.

“Let’s see what Al thinks,” Mustang said.

Over the not-nearly-distant-enough strains of Michael Bublé crooning about snow and love and gift-giving and other things that had only ever brought Ed a significant amount of pain, he heard Mustang picking up the telephone. There was silence for a few seconds. And then Mustang started to say “Good evening” only to get cut off about three-quarters of the way through.

After a short pause, Mustang said, “Well, he hasn’t actually… he hasn’t really _done_ anything.” Ed grimaced at Mustang’s ceiling. “I know.” Al had just said something like _That’s unusual_ ; Ed knew it. “He was—I’m afraid he was bitten by a werewolf.”

This silence deepened swifter than a snowbank rising in the night.

“I’m sorry,” Mustang offered after a few moments of a chilly emptiness that reminded Ed of something he could almost… “I was proposing that we take him to the emergency room. Saint Mungo’s would have to report him, and I—ah. Yes. It’s 6 Briery Bauks, just near the Crags. See you s—ah.”

Mustang hung up the phone.

He stepped into the kitchen doorway, hands in his pockets, and looked at the front door.

There was a tremendous _crack_ from outside it, and then a very urgent knocking.

“Coming,” Mustang said.

“ _Wait_!” Ed said. “Hide his gifts! Mustang—”

“Brother,” Al called through the door, “I don’t give a flying—”

“Oi!” Ed called back. “Watch your language!”

“Oh, that’s _rich_ ,” Al said.

Mustang sighed feelingly, but he was quickly gathering up Ed’s shopping bags.

“Professor!” Al called. The knocking on the door increased in volume and intensity, to the point that an uncharitable person might have characterized it more as _banging_ than as _knocking_. “Are you taking _his_ side?”

“I’m not taking anyone’s side,” Mustang said, shoving all of Ed’s carefully-curated, painstakingly-selected gifts under the table that the phonograph was on and then tossing a flannel blanket over them. “I just don’t want any of us to die tonight, after all this work to keep ourselves alive.”

“Al is not going to kill you,” Ed said.

“Yet,” Al called through the door.

To his credit, Mustang opened it anyway.

“Thank you,” Al said, followed immediately by, “Oh, my _God_!”

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Ed said, trying to shift enough to make one of Mustang’s bloodstained scatter cushions hide more of the mess. “It…”

His voice died in his throat, and part of his soul went with it, because Al was standing in the middle of Mustang’s rug, looking like he’d been shot.

“Brother,” Al said, voice quavering right on the edge of tears, “you know—you know what this—”

“It doesn’t have to change anything,” Mustang said.

Al startled hard enough that Ed instinctively reached out towards him, which felt very weird because his extremities were still extremely floaty.

“Think about it,” Mustang said when Al had taken up staring incredulously at him instead of at Ed, which was arguably progress. “If we don’t report it, it’s not as though the culprit’s liable to turn himself in—no one but the three of us and… likely Ed’s mechanics ever needs to know. The two of you are self-employed, so no trouble there if he needs time off. I’ve been wanting to try making Wolfsbane anyway; I’ve just never had a reason. We can manage it. It’ll be fine.”

Al swallowed hard and looked to Ed again.

“Well,” Ed said, forcing the words out around a knot the size of a Quaffle in his throat, “it’s not gonna be _fine_ , but… it’s not gonna be as bad as automail, and it’s _definitely_ not gonna be as bad as what you went through, Al.”

Al swallowed again. “This is—this is the rest of your life, Brother.”

“Yeah,” Ed said. “And it’s the only rest of my life that I’ve got. Didn’t really get a choice. Relax. We’ll cross all the nasty bridges when we get there.”

Al pressed both hands over his face and made a muffled sound that bore a strong resemblance to a half-stifled laugh-sob. “‘Relax’, he says.”

Mustang cleared his throat. “About that emergency room—”

“Can’t you make something that’ll stimulate his bone marrow into producing more red blood cells?” Al asked. “There really ought to be a potion for that.”

Mustang looked like he’d been struck in the head. What a terrifically violent night all around—wasn’t it supposed to be silent instead, this time of year? Christmas was such a crock.

“The average ER is a bit better equipped for that than I am at home,” Mustang said, “but—”

“I’m not _dying_ ,” Ed said. “I’m just dizzy. We can Floo home so I don’t splinch myself, and then—”

“Oh, no,” Al said, crossing to the wingtip that Mustang had vacated and settling right on the edge of the cushion. “We’re not moving until you’ve had a liter of water and a proper meal and a long rest.” Evidently the empty Lucozade bottle that Ed had carefully set on the floor by the couch was not cutting it, as Al was glaring up at Mustang. “Are we?”

Mustang looked at him. There was a healthy dose of admiration in it, and a rational amount of fear. That was an appropriate reaction to Al, as far as Ed was concerned.

“Apparently not,” Mustang said. “I suppose I had better find Ed something to eat. Would you like some tea, Alphonse?”

Al’s shoulders sank, and the relief rattled through him in one long tremor, and Ed tried to reach a poorly-responding hand out towards him again. “Yes, please, Professor.”

“At this point,” Mustang said, ghosting off into the kitchen, “I think I had better insist that you call me Roy.”

  


* * *

  


Al fell asleep in the chair five minutes after midnight, which was ten minutes longer than Ed had expected him to last. He was going to wake up with a crick in his neck. Ed felt awful about that.

Ed felt pretty awful overall and about everything, but the burger that Mustang had made for him had been so mouthwateringly spectacular despite a conspicuous lack of spicy peppers that he’d perked up a bit.

“Hey,” he said. Mustang looked up from whatever mysterious thing he’d been doing on his laptop for the past half-hour except for periodic breaks to shuffle over in his house shoes and time Ed’s pulse and then take his blood pressure after that. “I’m going to send you a gift basket the size of a griffin. And a gift card for iTunes, so that you can start trying to find your way into the right century.”

Mustang smiled. “Neither of those are necessary.”

Ed scowled at him. “Mustang, it’s not like you gave me a lift to the train station or some shit, here. You saved my _life_.”

“Which was,” Mustang said, “significantly more rewarding in its own right than letting you die on my doorstep likely would have been.”

Apparently Mustang had forgotten that Ed could out-contrary him every single day of the week with time left to knit a scarf. “You didn’t even volunteer. I didn’t give you a choice.”

Mustang put his elbow on the arm of his chair—which he’d dragged in from the kitchen, because Al had passed out in his wingtip—and propped his chin up on his hand. “I could have called an ambulance.”

That had, in the strictest sense of the word, been possible. Mustang _could_ have; he had been physically capable of raising his phone and dialing. He could even have offered better than the bare minimum and kept pressure on Ed’s hemorrhaging neck until they heard sirens, but then left it at that.

But they both knew damn well that he never _would_ have. They both knew that he’d never had it in him. They both knew that that was why Ed had come here in the first place—that the first instant that Ed had stepped into this Michael Bublé-soundtracked, half-assedly-decorated little home, he’d press-ganged Mustang into this.

They had shared history. Ed had not just been a student—Ed had been a student who had reminded Mustang unsettlingly of himself. Mustang was the type of person who read significance into shit, and who believed that the world was cyclical and circular, and who yearned for absolution so damn badly that he couldn’t even conceptualize of deserving it. When you got right down to it, Ed had played him like a pickpocket with a mark.

Well—Ed had played him like a dying twenty-two-year-old with debts to pay and scores to settle and a desperate instinct in the back of his animal brain screaming that Roy Mustang would help him before it was too late, but there was definitely some overlap.

It was fine, though. Ed would seek his revenge, taking _seek revenge_ to mean _have gratitude delivered to Mustang’s doorstep that he hadn’t died on, by way of as many heavy packages as he could afford_. Ed was more patient than most people gave him credit for, and a little bit of Al’s deviousness had rubbed off over the years. Christmas was the perfect time to send somebody a bunch of unmarked packages of stuff that they hadn’t even realized that they’d wanted. Mustang wouldn’t suspect a thing.

  


* * *

  


On the twenty-third of December, there was a little cream-colored envelope on top of the rest of the mail that dropped through the slot in their door. The envelope said _Mr Elric_ in handwriting that Ed was fairly sure he recognized. It was, in a weird way, hilarious that Mustang had prevailed on Royal Mail instead of sending an owl.

The little cream-colored stationery inside of the little cream-colored envelope contained more of the handwriting. It read:

_Dear Ed,_

_Thank you for the entirely unnecessary gift basket that I asked you not to send. Thank you also for the hot cocoa set. I am assuming that the included mug did not read “I am always right about everything all of the time; it’s part of my ‘charm’” when you purchased it, so thank you for altering it and making Riza laugh so hard she had to leave the room. Thank you also for the nice candles, and the nice brandy, and the lovely homemade Welsh cakes, and the nice tree ornament. I am guessing that the ornament did not say “Martyr of the Year 2015” when it was originally acquired._

_Despite my deep and sincere gratitude for all of the completely unneeded thank-you presents that I specifically told you were not called for, I do need to beg you at this point to please stop sending them. Riza choked on a Welsh cake when she saw the ornament and nearly died and then said “It was worth it”, at which point_ I _nearly died. It was very harrowing. I am much too old for December to be this harrowing more than once._

_In any case, I hope you and Al are very well, and have run out of gift ideas to torment me with as thanks. If not, please think of Riza._

_I’ll see you in a few weeks, shall I?_

_All of my best,_

_—RM_

  


* * *

  


On Christmas morning, their owl—Betty—brought Ed a parcel with Mustang’s place penned out as the return address. The package contained two wrapped gifts: a larger, nearly-flat one; and a smaller, extraordinarily heavy one that said _Open this first_. Naturally, Ed started with the other one.

It was a copy of the Michael Bublé Christmas collection LP, in a slightly worn record sleeve, with a note reading _I expected as much. Now you can open the other one_ on top.

Ed had barely worked his way up to a proper seethe over the sheer fucking _audacity_ of Mustang sending him a _used_ copy of a record that he couldn’t play of an album that he never wanted to hear again before he unwrapped the second gift.

The second gift was a hammer.

The note on top of it said _Merry Christmas, Ed_.


End file.
